Associated Incidents
Abstract: Software personal assistants continue to be a topic of significant research interest. This article outlines some of the important lessons learned from a successfully deployed team of personal assistant agents (Electric Elves) in an office environment. In the Electric Elves project, a team of almost a dozen personal assistant agents were continually active for seven months. Each elf (agent) represented one person and assisted in daily activities in an actual office environment. This project led to several important observations about privacy, adjustable autonomy, and social norms in office environments. In addition to outlining some of the key lessons learned we outline our continued research to address some of the concerns raised.
The topic of software personal assistants, particularly for office environments, is of continued and growing research interest (Scerri, Pynadath, and Tambe 2002; Maheswaran et al. 2004; Modi and Veloso 2005; Pynadath and Tambe 2003). The goal is to provide software agent assistants for individuals in an office as well as software agents that represent shared office resources. The resulting set of agents coordinate as a team to facilitate routine office activities. This article outlines some key lessons learned during the successful deployment of a team of a dozen agents, called Electric Elves (EElves), which ran continually from June 2000 to December 2000 at the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) at the University of Southern California (USC) (Scerri, Pynadath, and Tambe 2002; Chalupsky et al. 2002; Pynadath and Tambe 2003, 2001; Pynadath et al. 2000). Each elf (agent) acted as an assistant to one person and aided in the daily activities of an actual office environment. Originally, the E-Elves project was designed to focus on team coordination among software agents. However, while team coordination remained an interesting challenge, several other unanticipated research issues came to the fore. Among these new issues were adjustable autonomy (agents dynamically adjusting their own level of autonomy), as well as privacy and social norms in office environments. Several earlier publications outline the primary technical contributions of E-Elves and research inspired by E-Elves in detail. However, the goal of this article is to highlight some of what went wrong in the E-Elves project and provide a broad overview of technical advances in the areas of concern without providing specific technical details.